I’ve been a journalist for over 20 years. I began as a feature writer on the UK’s Independent on Sunday newspaper and set up as a freelance in 2000. Since then, I’ve written for many of the UK’s national newspapers and magazines, from the Financial Times and the Guardian to Country Living and Cosmopolitan, and I’ve interviewed everyone from A-list celebrities, businesspeople, sportspeople and musicians to teachers and teenagers, farmers and fashion designers, cooks and criminals – plus many others. I’ve also recently been back to university to pick up a second degree in psychology, because the human mind fascinates me. Everyone has an interesting story to tell if it’s presented well and that’s what I like to do.

Success Story: How Do You Make Your Blog Pay? Eight Hints From A Profit-Making Blogger

Hero Brown launched her Muddy Stilettos website in 2011, after moving from London to rural Buckinghamshire and finding that reliable information on the best restaurants, walks, boutiques, hotels, day trips and events in her area was thin on the ground. Brown, formerly a magazine editor and journalist, has written for many national UK publications, so perhaps it’s no surprise that her fresh and witty take on the delights of Buckinghamshire has proved such a hit (I subscribe and I don’t even live there). What started as a project mainly for fun is now how she earns her living. Muddy Stilettos has 5,000 subscribers, 15,000 unique readers a month and 6,500 followers on Twitter and Facebook.

Muddy Stilettos may not be on the same scale as Forbes.com (yet) – but lots of us would like to profit from writing online about a topic we love. So: how do you turn your blog into a profitable enterprise?

Muddy Stiletto queen Hero Brown

Be your own brand

“I think of Muddy Stilettos as an online magazine. It’s well-researched, well-written and I’m constantly thinking about my readers. Lots of blogs by their nature are a kind of stream of consciousness – look at me, this is what I did, I’m thinking this today – but I come at it from more of an editorial angle. What will help my readers have a great day? What will they find interesting or funny? With successful blogs people buy into you as a person and the vision you have, and I’m always myself when I write, but I always have the reader in mind, and I think that makes a difference.”

Meet a need

“When I moved to Buckinghamshire, I needed to find out about things happening around me. Having recognised that need of my own, I then thought of all the other people migrating out of London. Like any good idea, Muddy Stilettos meets a need.”

Find your target audience

“I target a demographic that nobody else does out here. My readers are women, primarily 30-55, most have children, they are quite urbane, they have money, they want to go out and have a good time.”

Make sure your readers know they can rely on you

“The whole point of Muddy Stilettos is that you trust it to help you make the most of your free time. I visit everything myself – I never rely on press releases. Last year, Flawless and the English National Ballet did a mash-up that came into the area. I thought it was amazing and recommended it – and I was accosted in the school playground by someone saying they’d bought six tickets for the show. Those tickets were £50 each – someone had spent £300 on my recommendation so it’s really important that people can trust me. And if they trust me, they’ll trust my advertisers too, so I won’t have any advertisers I don’t think are good. I could earn more money from advertising if I was less fussy, but if I don’t keep that high quality bar, the whole reason for reading Muddy Stilettos disappears.”

Diversify

“I’ve opened a Muddy Boutique and I also have a directory up and running – they provide different strands of income from the blog. It’s important to diversify rather than just relying on advertising – with the recession, people are thinking very hard about how to use their advertising budgets. I’m planning to franchise and extend into other counties over the next couple of years. I’ve become far more business-oriented than I ever thought I would be, because I’ve found something I love and I want to make it work. Muddy has also led to other opportunities. I do blogs and Tweets for other companies; for example, a Tweet calendar every month for a big lifestyle company, which is a different income stream that’s popped up.”

Be disciplined

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked as hard as I work now. You have to post regularly: every day at 8.15am, a Muddy Stilettos post is in every subscriber’s inbox. It’s very rare that I have a day off. Blogging is bums on seats: you need to have the right numbers for people to advertise with you. If people find a newsletter in their inbox in the morning, even if only half of them click on it, you’ve got them on your site. I think that’s the difference between a professional blog and someone who blogs just because they enjoy it. I started Muddy Stilettos for fun, then thought ‘I really want to do this!’ and worked very hard to get to 10,000 uniques. At that point, I was competing with local magazines and newspapers, and then I went professional.”

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My advice is to make sure you have loads and loads of good content. And good doesn’t even mean that it has to be involving… look at buzzfeed! They re-post stuff found on mashable and reddit etc. You might also want to be come a brand advocate for a couple of brands. By focusing on a few you will be noticed and invited to events etc which will all serve to make your blog unique and help you connect with fanboys/girls increasing your reach! its a win-win.

Thanks for an inspiring story Hester. It’s encouraging to a lot of bloggers to hear that there are ways of making it pay. When there’s so much doom and gloom about journalism around, it’s good to know that it seems to have a future after all.

Thanks to you for taking the time to comment! I’m really glad you found this piece inspiring – I’m hoping to come back to this topic later in the year and perhaps some more specific hints on finance might be a useful start point …

I just got married and now ive shifted to Riyadh. Left my lucrative job as a marketing specialist and now trying my hands in cooking and doing all other cool stuff that I can. While browsing the web I found your blog. Must say its very inspiring for someone like me. I am very clear and determined now to create a blog with all the cool stuff that I do. Im sure I will have an audience for that too and will be able to use my marketing skills. Just need to invest my time and use my strengths in a right way.

Great article! Just to take it one step further and really give yourself a head start on creating a successful blog; I would say they need to talk to someone 1-1 who has been there done that to really get the low down about what to expect and how to do it right. My friend did just this (she scheduled a call with Maria Liberati: https://www.wisewords.co/experiences/2204/) and it helped her so much.

I got so enthusiastic by reading personal development articles on www.forbes.com that I created www.liftmyenergy.com, having in mind that we don’t only manage time, but energy. I plan to bet on content!